I studied the Hellenistic period thoroughly when I was in college and a bit of the Romans ending with Augustus. I suppose that Greek and Latin would have been somewhat useful, but my high school and middle school experiences learning Spanish and French convinced me that any work of merit was going to be translated by professionals a lot better than I could do it. Despite being a lawyer, Latin would be useless to me. Another living language would be valuable, particularly Spanish in California.
It is more important to learn about the various methods of birth control than about Tacitus or Cicero; and you can learn about Tacitus or Cicero without reading them in Latin.
In terms of geography, US and World History, yes.
As a substitute teacher, I was amazed by how many HS kids didn’t know where places like Greenland, Hong Kong, etc. were. Also events like WWI, the Civil War-I met one kid who thought that WWII and Vietnam were the same war.
45 years ago only one of the big high schools in my part of Queens offered Latin. My daughter took it at Berkeley here senior year of high school for fun - it hasn’t been of much use. I’m more worried about dropping languages, like German, which are going to be useful even if you aren’t planning to study for the priesthood. And teaching Chinese or Japanese would be both more useful and more broadening.
BTW, in 1965, when I was in junior high, a study got published saying how kids these days are not as smart as in the good old days because no one knew where Vietnam was. (We learned. ) Same old, same old. In math, my kids learned concepts like binary numbers and set theory long before I did. They wrote papers with footnotes also.
I assume you support a tax increase to pay for all this stuff. California schools were doing find before the conservatives got involved.
Look, I know 13 year olds are either precocious or insufferable (or both!), but I have never, ever met a teenager (even when I was one, which wasn’t that long ago) decrying the lack of Latin education in high schools. Seriously, that’s the sort of thing Martin from The Simpsons goes on about, and he’s really popular, isn’t he? (end sarcasm mode).
Even when I was in high school, a kid- especially a Third Former (someone around the 13-14 age) going around with their nose in the air sniffing that the school wasn’t teaching Cicero in the original Latin and that was unacceptable would have been getting Atomic Wedgies from other nerds for being an insufferable, pretentious wanker.
There’s nothing stopping you from learning Latin in your own time (learning other languages is a useful skill and fun hobby), and good on you if you choose to take the initiative and do that. But you’re not going to have a fun time at high school if you get labelled Nerdmeister Pursuivant and go around spouting nonsense about how you’re at some second-rate school because they don’t teach Latin there.
This threw me for a while, but eventually I realized how I was misparsing it. That is, I assume, given your background as a computer scientist, you are saying merely that your kids learnt these concepts at an earlier age than you did (presumably due to “New Math”), and not that they were actually exposed to binary numbers at an earlier point in history than you were.
Ridiculously false.
Almost all the claims for how students USED to know made in this thread are utter nonsense. Curtis Lemay claims that until 1950 “most students were educated in the classics and learned Latin and Classic Greek.” That is obviously nonsense, or else you’d have to explain why I have never in my life met a person educated before 1950 who knew any Latin or classical Greek. ralph124c implied kids in the past knew a lot about the locations of Greenland and Hong Kong and such, but not for an instant do I believe they were any likelier to know that than kids today. don’t ask repeats the usual old saw about some article he read where kids did worse on a test than the kids X years ago,which ignores that the test from X years ago isn’t what they’re being taught today and that the kids from X years ago would certainly have flopped the tests being given today.
If kids today are worse educated that the kids from yesteryear, tell me; why aren’t ALL old people fricking geniuses? If they were so much better educated, they should be, from my perspective as a 38-year-old, amazingly well informed, educated polymaths. But in fact, most people in my father’s age group are dolts, or at least they’re just as likely to be fools as people in any other age group. Where are all the old geniuses?
I’m probably off to the left of the bell-curve since I went to a ridiculously underfunded county school in semi-rural NC, but my high school education was ghastly. Only French and Spanish were offered, and I think only 1-2 years of each, and neither was required. Pre-calculus was our highest math class. We didn’t have computers or internet-- typing class was on typewriters, and this was the mid/late '90s. We didn’t read a single book in high school. The closest we came was Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, and IIRC we only read about half and then watched the movie WITH THE BOOBIES CUT OUT. :mad:
I actually dropped out after my 2nd year and went to an adult high school program in the closest large city and got a far superior education. Looking back, it makes sense why the few people I knew who went to college quickly dropped out. They were in no way even close to being prepared.
I think that there’s probably a better argument for a lack of decorum and civil discourse and general behavior in schools today versus “back in the day”, but not quality of education.
You missed out man. That was a highlight of 9th grade to be sure.
None of my grandfathers (three of them) had more than an eighth grade education. I’m sure none of them could find Greenland on a map. (One was really good at simple math as a machinist, but none of them did higher math). Susan B Anthony was homeschooled after her teacher would not teach her long division because she was female.
The difference between “long ago” and “now” is that long ago we didn’t give EVERYONE an education. And the people who generally got the good classical education (Latin, etc.) often paid for it privately (you can probably still get a classical education at Choate).
They don’t actually need to be more educated, though. If you graduated high school in 1950 (as my father did), you had all the educational credentials for being a plant manager. You might even be an executive, if you had intelligence and some social skills. I don’t think that a college graduate with a BBA is any more educated than a high school graduate was then. In fact, my grandfather retired as a manager for an insurance company. He was as well-read and knowledgeable and literate as just about any college graduate. He dropped out of school in 7th grade.
A big part odf the reason that college students are not as well-educated is simply that credentialism requires people to get degrees that aren’t going to make them more effective workers, in order to get good jobs. About ten years ago, George Will noted in one of his columns that an employment ad for a Gap store manager had the requirements: “Bachelor’s degree and ability to lift 50 pounds.” These two requirements have traditionally been mutually exclusive.
Not true at all. I worked for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, only a couple years ago, and we had many presidents and executives who were earning 6 and 7 figures without having ever been to college, and I’m not talking about the sales team (though they earned a lot too and virtually none of them went to college.) The head of HR once told me during a personal conversation that the only time she ever looked at the Education field on a resume was when she was hiring our corporate attorney.
Given that I learned that stuff in high school, I hope so! I don’t live in the Ozarks! 
There is certainly a large gap between the type of information a turn-of-the-century student would learn versus today (i.e. Latin) but as far as volume, if my grandfather learned a greater array of topics in his eighth grade education it was because everyone knew that was all he was going to get.
I thought school was easy, but I didn’t have to get up at 4 in morning to milk cows or learn a trade while doing it.
Call To Freedom Beginnings to 1914 (Austin: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 2000)
Holt Social Studies: United States History Beginnings to 1914 (Austin: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 2006)
The exact same period of coverage and my own social studies teacher has acknowledged this.
Well we have to take a foreign language and I’m considering French but I would have taken Latin if they’d offered it. And their offer of languages is strange-they offer Japanese but not Chinese although it’s clear Japan’s going to be relatively smaller in the future while China will be the great economic power.
Learning Latin privately would cost prohibitively so can’t do that. Also I keep these opinions to myself in school.
Did you forget to mention that the slightly slimmer(not half the size by far) 2006 edition comes with an interactive cd-rom containing info not in the book?
Curtis, I’m curious as to your response to two of my points:
-
If in fact kids up to 1950 were commonly educated in Latin and classical Greek, can you please explain why so few senior citizens know any Latin or classical Greek, and
-
If in fact education used to be better, why is it not evident that older people are better educated? If your claims are true, I don’t know why I know so many older people who are ignorant dumbasses.
We never use it.
A lot of them didn’t go to college or high school at all or may have forgotten it.
But it is still there, whether you use it or not. Why don’t you go look at the information contained in the book and the cd-rom before you decide which edition provides more information?